Harder.

Behind the first Child—more tears formed.

The first rupture was no longer alone.

The abyss pulsed, and the world split again.

And again.

And again.

Each tear opened faster than the last, reality weakening under the strain, its resistance slowing as the pressure mounted.

From each rupture, something else forced its way through—serpentine horrors with too many joints and not enough bones slithered through, their bodies glitching between forms—now centipede, now angel, now something that had no name because names were for things that belonged.

Winged things that were never birds flapped through on wings made of screaming souls. Limbs sprouted, withered, exploded into new limbs tipped with mouths that whispered every secret fear you had ever tried to forget.

They poured out.

Endless.

Hungry.

The Unfinished Children.

The ground split into canyons as they landed, their weight alone enough to make mountains kneel.

They surged toward the dome in a tide of writhing corruption, leaping, slamming, biting into the barrier with jaws that kept growing new rows of teeth even as the fire annihilated them.

Some disintegrated instantly—bodies flash-boiled into ash that still screamed. Others survived long enough to adapt, their flesh learning the shape of obliteration and wearing it like armor.

They slammed again. Harder. Hungrier.

The dome—once perfect, once eternal—began to bleed.

Cracks spider-webbed across its surface, glowing not with blue light but with sickly, pus-yellow fractures where the abyss had already won.

Whole sections sagged, dripping molten reality that hissed and burned the creatures even as it fed them.

The Unfinished Children howled in ecstasy, their voices layered with the death-cries of every world that had ever ended.

They surged toward the barrier.

Some leapt.

Some slammed into it headfirst.

The dome answered with merciless force.

Blue light flared violently as creatures struck its surface, entire bodies igniting in silent annihilation as the barrier erased them on contact.

Some disintegrated instantly, their forms collapsing into nothing before they could even scream.

Others—

survived.

Barely.

They recoiled, flesh reforming, adapting faster now, their bodies learning, adjusting, resisting the erasure as they threw themselves forward again, driven not by thought but by something deeper.

And with every strike, the dome grew weaker. Its once-perfect surface now bled black corruption from widening fractures. The brilliant light flickered, dimmed, began to rot from the inside out.

Whole sections sagged, dripping molten reality that hissed and burned the creatures even as it fed them.

The Unfinished Children howled in ecstasy, their voices layered with the death-cries of every world that had ever ended.

Hunger.

Wrath.

The need to unmake.

The air itself had become a crime against existence.

It no longer carried breath; it carried weight, a crushing, intestinal pressure that squeezed the forest into pulp. Ancient trees exploded outward in showers of splintered bone and screaming sap, their trunks folding like wet paper under the sheer mass of things that had never been meant to walk on soil.

The ground tore open in bleeding trenches, each impact birthing new fissures that vomited black ichor upward in slow, peristaltic waves.

From the tears, darkness did not spill.

It defecated thick, living tar that poured through the wounds in reality, heavy as molten sin, crashing to the earth and spreading like gangrene.

Wherever it touched, matter forgot what it was. Leaves curdled into eyeballs that blinked once and liquefied. Stones softened into screaming mouths that begged in languages that had died before time began.

The very light of the world curdled, turning into pus-yellow threads that dripped upward into the sky, which itself had begun to sag like rotting meat stretched too thin over a breaking ribcage.

Reality tried to hold.

It failed in wet, humiliating increments.

The tears widened with obscene, fleshy sounds—labia of the cosmos ripping wider, edges fraying into strands of unraveling causality. The sky bowed inward, bending, pregnant with impossible pressure, until entire constellations twisted into screaming fetal shapes before snuffing out forever.

At the center of the apocalypse, Sienna stood.

Still.

Unmoving.

But her body was paying the price.

Each inhale now sounded like tearing parchment. Her chest heaved with violent effort, ribs threatening to crack under the strain of keeping the wound between worlds pried open. Sweat poured from her in rivulets of liquid shadow, carving black trails down her face and throat.

Her hands shook with bone-deep tremors, fingers clawing at nothing as if physically holding the edges of existence apart while the universe itself clawed back, desperate to sew itself shut.

She did not stop.

She could not stop.

The abyss answered her like a lover that had waited eons to violate her.

More tears tore open—faster, uglier, wetter.

Each new rupture birthed a chorus of wet popping and grinding as the skin of the world split wider, wider, wider.

The dome flickered.

Once.

Twice.

Then it screamed.

Its once-perfect lattice of divine geometry warped, veins of black corruption threading through the blue light like infected arteries.

The Unfinished Children had learned.

Their attacks were no longer mindless. They struck with obscene intelligence, bodies reshaping mid-leap—limbs lengthening into barbed spears, mouths blooming with concentric rings of teeth that rotated like drill bits, wings hardening into razor-edged scythes.

But the dome was also not that simple... after all it was something a Lesser God had created!

The dragon-thing lunged again.

This time it did not roar.

It fed.

Its maw—now a distended, pulsating abyss lined with endless rows of regenerating fangs—clamped onto the dome’s surface.

Teeth sank in with a sound like continents grinding together. The dome’s energy erupted in frantic, blinding bursts, burning away entire sections of its face in screaming vapor, yet the creature only moaned in ecstasy.

Flesh boiled off. Bone blackened and cracked. Then the corruption surged forward, rebuilding faster than the light could erase it. Scales of living void hardened over the wounds. The jaws tightened. Deepened. Chewed.

Behind it, the horde piled on in a writhing mountain of unfinished blasphemy.

Serpentine horrors coiled around the dragon’s neck, adding their own gnawing mouths. Things with too many joints and not enough skeletons slammed their bodies against the same point, their forms melting and reforming into whatever shape would hurt the barrier most.

Claws became drills. Tails became battering rams tipped with infant faces that wept acid.

Every creature that died in holy fire simply fed its dissolving essence into the others, making them stronger, meaner, hungrier.

The dome screamed—a sound like every prayer ever uttered being inverted and raped at once.

And then it began to bleed more than before.

Great fractures split across its apex, not cracks of light but weeping sores that dripped molten reality in thick, glowing pus. Sections of the barrier sagged like infected flesh, bulging outward before collapsing inward, the sacred geometry twisting into obscene, tumorous shapes.

Cassiopeia’s legs gave out beneath her.

She collapsed hard, knees slamming into soil that had become warm, pulsing meat. Her hands scrabbled uselessly against the ground as it twitched beneath her palms like living skin. Her breath came in ragged, animal gasps. Terror had hollowed her out so completely that her mind could no longer form coherent thoughts—only raw, animal understanding:

This is not power.

This is not even evil.

This was the end of endings.

She stared up at Sienna through tear-blurred eyes, the girl she thought she knew now nothing more than a trembling silhouette framed by an ocean of writhing void.

"...what are you...?" she whimpered, voice cracking into a child’s sob.

Sienna did not answer.

Did not even glance down.

Her eyes remained fixed on the dying dome, on the mountain of Unfinished Children now eating their way through the last bastion of order.

Behind her, the abyss kept pouring.

Endless.

Patient.

Certain.

It did not rage.

It was not hurry at all.

It simply smiled with a billion unfinished mouths, because it had always known the truth of every world: They all broke eventually.

And now—

this one finally had the teeth.

And the teeth were smiling.